bob's blog

The creative force.....suspended in nothing.

I was reading Sartre’s essays last January under the meager light of 12 volt electrics and failing daylight. The fact that I mixed in some Mt. Gay and tonic made the task even more daunting. I tried propping myself on an elbow and lay there horizontal under the sway of the hook. The pillow inching closer by the instant. I read and reread a sentence or two and stopped to ponder.

Contemplating life’s mysteries while suspended in a meditative trance.

Life floats on a bed of nothing. The creative dynamic force that drives the universe suspends all on nothing. The various branches of living organisms march down different pathways of light emanating from the luminous being at the center of darkness which is the vast vestibule of nothing. Some proceed on a course that allows their style of being to thrive for eons consuming their way on a steady diet of things born of no thing, some die off being the fodder that promotes another style of being. Not necessarily superior/inferior, decidedly consumer/consumed.

It’s difficult to image being from no thing. How could that be. Is god a thing or a no thing?

Lao Tsu talked of “all that there is and all that is not there. Sartre talked of being and nothingness. “What being will be must of necessity arise on the basis of what it is not.”

“Being is that and outside of that, nothing.”

I bought a wonderful print recently of “Buddah Falls” a mirage created from a photo of a waterfall that was constructed of two mirror images split down the middle. It’s difficult to convey the mystery that is contained in the scene. I looked at it in awe thinking that some high religious culture created the scene out of natural rock and used it as some spiritual ritual, a coming of age ritual or enlightenment ceremony. A truly monumental endeavor to make the waterfall as natural looking as possible with visions of the Buddah emerging from the mist and splashback from the water’s interaction with stone.

I was devastated to discover that it had been just a waterfall in real life that was doctored to make it perfectly symmetrical. The mystery returned when I suspended my disbelief and saw it for what it truly was. The Buddah emerging from no thing.

God is the boundary layer between darkness and the nothingness that resides there and everything that we perceive, intuit, feel and imagine. God is a kind of filter between what is not and the immense potential of what can be. The big plan, if there is a big plan, is for life to twist, turn, reconfigure, die off and be reborn in myriad colorful and imaginative configurations. A kaleidoscope of chemical compounds that twist into double helixes, detach and re-configure in huge complexities using only guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine as code pairs to build DNA chains that contain all the potential to be. Outside of that there is no thing. Potential un-achieved, languishing in darkness.

All of the cells in the human body can be operating as a well oiled machine one moment and achieving potential, imagining the wherefrom, when poof, the fire in the belly goes out, the sun dries the remaining lifeless body into water vapor, dust and ashes. The life goes from now here to no where.

The light shines on, perceived by the body in motion, the godhead, the source of being, disparate, separate, making, coagulating, un-making, de constructing.

For what purpose but to be here now, and not to be here then, in the same style.

God is a body stylist, assuming the form of a dinosaur, dying off to resurrect as a flying insect that morphs into a wormlike grub, living under ground for 12 years like the Cicada only to emerge and devour the wheat fields that would otherwise have supported the human specie. For what reason but to keep the wheel of life spinning new and interesting things from air, water, sunlight and no thing. Pure energy, before movement in molecules can point to it.

If energy is discernible movement on a molecular scale, God is the most hyperactive individual that has ever and will ever exist. Made of all the molecules in the observable Universe (if you can’t see them, do they make noise?) coming together and moving apart at the speed of light. A huge constant collision, the impact of which can be detrimental to your consciousness.

It’s all there in the waterfall, that is pictured in the works of Escher, constantly flowing, yet always there still.

I’m the little guy on the second balcony, looking around. Or then again maybe I was just a figment of my imagination.

Bob

Posted by Bob at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 2nd American Republic will be conceived at a keyboard and will elucidate an ideal that will propagate at network speed. It will be such a compelling truth that the statement of it alone will rock the foundation of the 1st American Republic.

I further believe that the foundation, the very first principle on which self-government exists shall be re-established and affirmed, to wit, all legitimate government exists by the willing consent of the governed.

The founding principle of any legitimate government is based on the ability to guarantee to the people inalienable rights and freedoms, and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas and ideals and to live secure lives free of intimidation and fear. The first duty of all government is to secure for the people an opportunity to seek truth.

The fundamental premise for establishing a 2nd American Republic is that a people, with a wink, a blink, and a nod can demonstrate to each other in subtle and private ways the failure of their most venerable civic institution and within days, if not hours, could, without violence, disassemble the walls that bind them, one stone after another. Just as certainly as the Great Wall of China was constructed, one stone after another, the people will reassemble the foundation of governance to support the edifice of self-government that better serves their need.

The percentage of the American population that has become the local, county, state and federal bureaucracy of administering law, law that the people in their wisdom have instituted, has in itself become a burden of sufficient size that all attempts at controlling the cost and growth of government has thwarted reform from within and without, and that government has become the fundamental problem that stands between the people and their pursuit of truth and happiness.

The vulnerability of this, OUR, established government, is nowhere more evident than in their financial underpinning. Government derives revenue from consumption taxes and when the people have no employment their consumption declines. The Government also derives revenue from gambling, and gaming and when the people in their wisdom decide to alter or re-invent their governing institutions, a very real avenue will be to willfully limit those voluntary gaming activities curtailing a revenue source that will severely impact government’s ability to meet fiscal obligations. As we can see from situations abroad, the loss of confidence in government is rapid and irreversible when the fiscal underpinning of government is in question.

If you consider your Government to be the best possible iteration of the principles established by freedom loving individuals, then support your government with daily donations at the lottery kiosk. If you think a new system of government has a better chance of providing a more secure future for you and those you love, then stop gratuitous consumption and walk past the lottery machine.

When the people withhold their consent, the government will free fall, collapsing from political gravity and fiscal bankruptcy, and no amount of State Violence can prevent or forestall that eventuality.

Bob

Posted by Bob at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The true believers, Religious Zealots, whose entire mental framework is defined in black and white, good and evil, are in their pulpits exhorting us to stay the course in Iraq. We may be doing bad things to innocent people, they argue, but overall, in the big picture, the bad things we do are nothing compared to the bad things others have done. Torture and sexual humiliation of “Enemy Combatants”, who by the way are not covered by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of “Prisoners of War”, a distinction that is too cute by half, has yielded much intelligence that will allow us to continue to pursue our International Goals.

Winning the war on terror, is for us the prize. We shall have won the war on terror when no one who is outcast, downtrodden or repressed will dare to challenge our dominant position in the Global Economy. It is imperative that we remember that we are fighting for World Domination, to pursue our goals of seeing our political and religious ideals and beliefs adopted across the entire world.

The Cold War was fought by our Military, Religious, Political and Industrial Complex to make our way of living, buying, selling and dying the norm. We, the followers of Judeo-Christian values want nothing less than to be permitted to impose through economics and politics our way of being in the world. This is after all, not a perfect world, but when push comes to shove, we want to be at the top of the heap.

Capitalism, having won such a hard fought war against social systems that limit how much power and money can be accumulated at the top, will not stand idly by and allow our wealth to be dissipated on a pie in the sky social system that puts power at the service of justice.

A just world order, one that makes food and medicine available to those in need, irrespective of their ability to pay, is a loser. The vast accumulation of wealth at the top cannot be reconciled with a distribution system that makes resources available to those unwilling or unable to pay.

Our economic system, which is based on putting the world’s resources at the disposal of those with the greatest wealth is not a just system, it is a free market system.

Free markets, we are constantly admonished, will deliver the greatest good to the greatest number, and while not perfect, is the best system we can devise for distribution of resources. The fact that half a continent is dying of AIDS or that two thirds of the world exists in squalor and poverty will not square with the “Compassionate Conservatism” of the free market capitalists.

Free markets are ruthless. They invent, and create “goods” for some, inadvertently creating “bads” for many. Because free markets rise and fall on the ability to identify and reward creative and inventive applications of new knowledge, we lavish untold wealth on individuals with skills to organize the productive capacity of the minions. Those charismatic or alluring individuals allow the organization around them to flourish and reward supporters with economic advantage. It is for the economic advantage that political and religious systems have fought so long and hard.

Is there another system of social organization capable of competing with free market capitalists? Can they deliver anything close to the standard of living or the level of education that Capitalism has provided? Is it a viable system that can withstand the test of time? Is it ruthless enough to stamp out and eliminate all competition for the world’s resources from competing systems? Is that a measure of its worth?

Terror comes from facing starvation and seeing images beamed around the world of beautiful people gorging themselves at the feast. It comes from watching a dying child that could be saved by a pharmaceutical, without the ability of acquiring it. Terror comes from watching free markets withhold the beneficial products from those in need, storing “goods” in warehouses while the quality of life and life expectancy itself continues to decline for the unfortunate.

The “War on Terror” is being fought by a freedom loving people who enjoy the vast resources of the known world, exclusive of the vast needs of the “other”. There is no winning this war, it is fundamentally about maintaining the distance between our system of economic domination and the people of the world that make our wealth possible.

Faced with the prospect of living and dying without hope, those who are trapped on the bottom want to eliminate our freedom, because freedom comes with responsibility and they know all too well that we have failed to make that connection.

Bob

Posted by Bob at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The proscenium arch of the Political Passionspiel frames the time and place when Government functions merely by the willing suspension of discontent instead of through a vigorous informed consent. Such a deplorable State can never be the beacon that is visible round the world. It is so easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that we have a handle on the fundamentals, when in fact we’re not on the court, or even yet out of the locker room.

In an effort to make my writing more plangent, and to awaken that segment of the socially active, to create a more dynamic Agenda for Peace, one that is capable of confronting the Agenda of Violence in all its Political, Economic and Religious manifestations, I took my writing with me to the asylum.

I never figured that the Carnivore, my target audience would actually read my words and validate their plausibility to the extent that they would begin a war on a possible scenario of doom that was a figment of imagination run wild. All the while the people were watching sports teams in near sudden death experiences oblivious to the bombs dropping over Baghdad, or the fires raging on the coast. I can only hope they were oblivious for none of them stopped to declare that “Shock and Awe” constitutes terrorism. To them it must have seemed like just another entertainment option.

My face, just a sand painting in the top half of the hourglass, was slipping away in a grotesque transformation, in silent witness to the power of the gravitational force exerted in the timespace fabric of the universe. It was as a sailboat slipping into the fog of night on a voyage to the far reaches of the unknown, each moment becoming less visible, less fathomable, less familiar. Into the black and oily night. It felt good to slip the lines that bound me to the hard and enter the womb of nature for a wet and wild ride under the stars.

Bob

Posted by Bob at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)